Xenonauts 2

There are two X-COMs. There is the one most people played — Firaxis’ 2012 reboot and its 2016 sequel, which took Julian Gollop’s original and streamlined it into something with cinematic camera swoops, two-action turns, and a soldier-customization screen designed to make you cry when Sergeant Your-Best-Friend’s-Name eats a plasma round. And then there is the one that existed before that: UFO: Enemy Unknown, a 1994 DOS game that was colder, denser, less interested in your feelings, and — depending on who you ask at the strategy-gaming table — considerably better.

Xenonauts 2 is unambiguously a sequel to the second one. Goldhawk Interactive, the small British studio behind 2014’s Xenonauts, has never pretended otherwise. This is a game built on action points rather than two-move turns, on time units spent in fractions to shuffle a soldier three tiles and still keep enough in reserve for a reaction shot. It is a game where you can crouch, where you can throw a grenade badly, where the fog of war conceals a thing that will kill you and the game will not warn you about it with a helpful red silhouette.

Set in an alternate 2009 that never quite left the Cold War, it casts you as the operational head of a covert multinational outfit assembled to answer an alien incursion that the world’s governments would rather not admit is happening. Published by Hooded Horse, it launched on Steam on April 2, 2026 at $19.99, and sits at an 82 on Metacritic. That number tells you something specific: this game does what it claims to do, for the people it claims to do it for, and it does not attempt to expand that circle by a single person.

The market position is unusual. This isn’t a game competing with XCOM 2. It’s competing with the memory of a game from 1994 — and it holds its own against the thing it’s paying tribute to on the merits.

• Two-layer campaign structure: A strategic geoscape where you build and staff a covert base network, manage funding relationships with partner nations, run a deep research tree, and scramble interceptors — feeding directly into a grid-based tactical layer where squads deploy to crash sites, terror attacks, and base assaults.
• Action-point tactical combat: Full AP economy with cover, line of sight, and suppression as a first-class mechanic. Fire enough rounds at a target and you pin it, whether or not you hit — the sharpest tactical addition over the 1994 template.
• Real-time air interception: UFO shootdowns play out as a live, pausable dogfight minigame with squadron positioning, afterburners, and missile ranges. It is not a die roll, and the design is built to be stressful.
• Permadeath with lasting consequence: Wounds persist across missions, hospital time is real time, and death is permanent. A Colonel with a long service record is an irreplaceable asset, and the game knows it.
• Two enemy factions: Multiple alien species plus the Cleaners, a human collaborator organization whose missions play by different rules — human enemies, human weapons, urban maps.

The Gameplay Loop

The loop here is a machine with no slack in it, and understanding why requires understanding the pressure gradient.

Your funding comes from partner nations. Their confidence in you is a number that drops when UFOs enter their airspace unopposed, when terror attacks go unanswered, when you lose. Confidence drops far enough, they withdraw, and your budget shrinks. Your budget determines how many scientists you can pay, how many bases you can operate, how many interceptors you can lose. The invasion escalates on a fixed schedule regardless of whether you can keep up.

That last clause is the whole game. Xenonauts 2 is a race against a technology curve, and the geoscape is a resource-allocation problem where every choice is a choice not to do three other things. Do you put the second base in South America to cover your funding exposure there, or in Asia where the UFO traffic is heaviest? Do you research the plasma rifle or the better armor? The armor keeps your veterans alive; the rifle means fewer aliens get a turn. Both are correct answers to different campaigns.

What separates this from its inspirations is that the strategic and tactical layers actually talk to each other with real consequence. Downing a UFO cleanly with interceptors means a crash site with intact alien corpses and salvageable components. Blowing it apart means less to recover. Capturing a live alien — which requires stun weapons, careful positioning, and the willingness to spend an entire squad’s turn on a non-lethal takedown while the thing is still shooting at you — unlocks interrogation research you cannot otherwise access. Your tactical decisions are literally your research budget. That feedback is tighter here than in most games in this lineage.

The Tactical Layer

This is where the game does its best work.

Action points beat the two-action system. The two-action model is elegant and readable, and it flattens tactical space into a binary: move-and-shoot, or move-move. AP gives you a continuous resource. You can step out from cover by one tile, take a snapshot at moderate accuracy, and step back — three distinct decisions with three distinct costs, all inside a single turn. You can hold points in reserve for reaction fire. You can decide that this soldier only moves half as far as she could, because the other half is insurance.

Suppression is the mechanic that makes it sing. Volume of fire matters independently of accuracy. A machine gunner who hits nothing but dumps twenty rounds into an alien’s cover has meaningfully changed the tactical situation — that alien’s AP is gutted, its accuracy is wrecked, and your assault trooper can now cross open ground. Fire and maneuver actually works here, in a turn-based game, which is a design achievement most tactics games never get near.

The line-of-sight and fog-of-war implementation is unfashionably harsh. There is no free intel. A rookie walked around the wrong corner will die for it, and the game offers no consolation. This is the correct design for what it’s trying to be, and it is also, unambiguously, the reason a substantial fraction of players bounce off early.

Onboarding Friction

Let’s be blunt about the biggest problem. The learning curve is not steep; it’s a wall with no handholds.

The game explains its systems adequately in a mechanical sense — you can find out what an action point is. What it does not do is teach you how to think. It does not communicate that your first base’s radar coverage is a strategic commitment, that hiring eight soldiers when you can only field six is a waste, that a squad without a stun weapon has locked itself out of a research branch. New players learn these things by losing a campaign deep into the mid-game and starting over. Veterans of the genre will call that authentic. It is also a design failure — the game’s own difficulty curve is built on lessons it never teaches.

The Mid-Game Sag

The other recurring complaint holds up on inspection: the middle of the campaign repeats itself. Crash site, crash site, crash site. The maps rotate, the alien composition shifts slowly, and the tactical problem stops changing before your research tree stops advancing. The Cleaners missions and terror attacks break this up, and base assaults are legitimately thrilling set pieces. But there’s a long stretch of the mid-campaign where the same encounter feeds the same research queue, and the game does not have enough map variety or mission-type variety to disguise it.

The art direction is the weakest thing here, and it isn’t close.

Xenonauts 2 looks fine. It is competent, readable, functional 3D with a muted Cold War palette and clean sightlines. Readability is genuinely good — you can always tell what is cover and what isn’t, which matters more than beauty in a game where a misread tile is a dead soldier. But there’s no visual identity. Nothing here would be recognizable in a screenshot without the UI. Compare the grim industrial aesthetic Firaxis built, or the deliberate retro-futurism of Phoenix Point, and Goldhawk’s world looks like placeholder art that shipped.

The UI is worse. It’s dense, it’s functional, and it has clearly been iterated on — but it carries the fingerprints of a long development cycle, with panels that follow different logics, information buried two clicks deeper than it should be, and a base-management screen that requires more scrolling than a game this systemic should tolerate. It’s the interface of a game designed by people who already know the game.

Technically, the design invites trouble. A Unity-based project with this development history and this much simulation running underneath is the kind of build where long campaigns and large tactical maps strain stability, and the architecture gives little reason to expect otherwise. Nothing here looks campaign-breaking. All of it is the kind of rough edge a larger studio would have sanded before ship.

Windows PC only, via Steam. No Mac build, no Linux build, no Deck verification to speak of.

That’s the right call, honestly. This game is mouse-and-keyboard down to its bones — the AP display, the tile-by-tile pathing preview, the geoscape’s dense information panels all assume a precise pointer and a screen you’re sitting close to. A controller adaptation would require rebuilding the interaction model, and a Deck-sized screen would make the base management layer illegible.

Steam-specific: the game ships with the usual Workshop-adjacent modding interest that this community reliably generates, and Hooded Horse has a strong track record of supporting titles post-launch. That support matters more than usual here, because the rough edges listed above are exactly the kind of thing patches can address.

Xenonauts 2 is a specialist’s tool, built by specialists, sold to specialists. It makes no concession to the mainstream and asks for none in return, and there is something bracing about a game in 2026 that simply refuses to negotiate with the player’s comfort.

The mechanical work is strong. Suppression, the AP economy, the causal loop running from tactical performance to research access to strategic survival — these are handled here better than in games with far larger budgets. When a mission goes right, when a flanking maneuver planned three turns ago pays off and a suppressed Sebillian dies without ever getting a shot away, it delivers a specific satisfaction the cinematic reboots trade away for spectacle.

What holds it back isn’t its difficulty. It’s the sense that the presentation layer, the interface, and the mid-game pacing were treated as chores rather than craft. Goldhawk spent its energy where it mattered most and had little left for everything else. That’s a defensible allocation for a small studio, and it’s also why we rate this a solid recommendation for the right audience — and only the right audience.

Buy it if the phrase “time units” means something to you. If it doesn’t, this game will hurt you, and it will not care.